As an invited commentator writing in the FREAKONOMICS June 21, 2011 blog posting, PESD director Frank Wolak lists 4 ways that countries abandoning nuclear power can continue to meet their power needs, all of which have substantial costs and risks of their own.

The authors of the N.Y. Times best-seller book Freakonomics posed the question “With Japan deciding not to expand its nuclear power base, and Germany and Switzerland vowing to phase out nuclear power altogether, how will those (and other) countries replace that electricity, and what sort of political, economic, and environmental trickle-down effects will we see?”